Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area.
Dozens or hundreds of integrated circuits are typically manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer. The individual dies are singulated by sawing the integrated circuits along scribe lines. The individual dies may then be used in an end application or packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, or in other types of packaging.